


Grief is the price we pay for love

by MissyJack



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 08:15:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissyJack/pseuds/MissyJack





	Grief is the price we pay for love

My post finale fic prompted by this quote: _Grief is the price we pay for love_ which someone tweeted at me after the finale. Unfortunately the quote isn't from anyone cool, its from QE2 after 9/11.

So yeah, its a story about grief.

 

On a Saturday night in the spring of 1999, Lisa Braden was at the Fickle Peach, one town over from Cicero, listening to a Prince tribute band called Purple Rain. She’d hooked up with the bass player a few weeks back and was hoping for a return engagement until this guy, Hollywood handsome in a beaten leather jacket, tried the cheesiest pick-up line ever on her. His name was Dean. The bass player got no love that night.

***

Dean’s grief was as painful as cancer. His whole body ached with it, and sometimes it would crash over him, leaving him doubled up and retching. It fogged his mind, such that even doing simple things took all his concentration.

He tried to contain his pain, tuck the corners in around him. He pictured himself as the Mummy from an old movie, trying to wrap himself up so others couldn’t see the horror of what he was, lurching through each day carrying his curse.

***

He became “Night of my life Dean”, an epithet that was not entirely accurate. Firstly, Friday night stretched into a three day weekend, and while the sex was great, despite some pillow talk that came straight out of a cheap porno, it wasn’t the best Lisa had ever had. However she had liked Dean a lot; that’s why she’d taken Monday off work. He made her laugh, and seemed genuinely interested in her in a way few of the guys she knew were.

And to be honest, the sex was pretty fantastic.

Lisa probably would’ve forgotten him pretty quickly -- she hooked up with the guitarist a couple more times, but couldn’t tell you his name --except that Dean became part of the repertoire of tales she and her girlfriends swapped. So “Night of my life Dean” took his place alongside “Steve the fridge mechanic”, “Donkey Dick Dave” and “Aussie Rob.”

***

Dean wasn’t sure why Lisa took him in and let him stay. Occasionally, a thought would stray through the haze, and he would wonder what he was doing, turning up at the home of a woman he barely knew expecting her hospitality like he was kin. Truth be told though, he didn’t think too much about how Lisa was feeling. Couldn’t think too much about anything other than Sam.

He slept on the couch, occasionally in Lisa’s bed but mainly on the couch, sometimes just lying there all day. Dean’d get up before Ben got home from school, trying not to look like some crazy person. He didn’t think he always succeeded, but at ten and with an encounter with a changeling behind him, Ben had a wider definition for sanity than most people.

***

When Ben was eight, Lisa threw him a huge birthday party. Batman cake, moon bounce, clown with a police clearance, the lot. The kids got high on sugar; the parents on chardonnay. Dean had turned up wearing the same leather jacket and lustful looks. She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered that he had remembered her and their weekend, or creeped out that he’d tracked her down all these years later, all these years and a mortgage and a kid later, and thought that she’d still be available for a quick fuck.

Then Dean and his brother had saved Ben and all the other kids. Dean had explained how the world really worked, and been patient as her mind at reeled at the idea of monsters being real.

She’d changed in eight years, and so had Dean. He was still funny and hot, but also more than a little sad. He stirred up complex feelings in her – she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to jump his bones or tuck him up under her Afghan and feed him soup and toast. Possibly both. But it didn’t matter because he left again.

***

Dean wanted to break his promise to Sam. He wanted to save him, or die trying. He wondered if Castiel had enough clout in Heaven to help, but he didn’t pray. He wondered if Bobby in his travels had heard something, but he didn’t call. After years of telling Sam what to do, Dean had finally asked him what he wanted -- and this was it.

He argued with himself, of course, that surely Sam had wanted Dean happy, not living like a heart-dead zombie. Anyway when Dean had been in Hell, Sam hadn’t kept his promise, had fought to save Dean anyway he could. Then Dean would remember the promise Sam had broken, and he could hear Sam’s voice, see that annoyed face of his, reminding where that had led. It was really annoying fighting with himself.

Worse still, it reminded him he didn’t have Sam to fight with.

***

Lisa had got a couple of texts and the odd email from Dean after the changeling thing, asking how she and Ben were but never implying he’d be back. Then the messages stopped. She and Ben shifted house to a hopefully supernatural-free neighborhood, and moved on with their lives. She didn’t tell the story of “Night of my life Dean” anymore but sometimes she and Ben would talk about the man who saved them who drove the cool car.

***

Dean got rid of all his guns – and knives, and grenades and even the salt and holy water – although he kept the pearl-handled Colt. If he hadn’t seen heaven, then maybe he would’ve used it on himself to stop the pain but the thought of being in some fake happy place, in a heaven he knew he was meant to share with Sam but never would, kept him living.

He remembered when he used to fantasize a “what if” life with a wife and a kid and no-one dying around him. It had seemed safe to want it because he thought he’d never have it. Sometimes it would hit him, when he and Lisa were out together shopping or at one of Ben’s soccer games, that maybe this was his family now.

Those times hurt the hardest.

***

When Dean knocked at her door, nearly two and a half years later, Lisa was shocked. She thought maybe he was drunk at first, but as she held him briefly she felt him trembling. He looked drawn, distraught, and was making no sense.

He rambled something about bad things that were going to happen, and her and Ben being safe. Dean said that if he ever thought of himself happy, she and Ben were part of it. Lisa didn’t tell him sometimes she thought the same thing.

Lisa tried to get him to stay but he refused, and she spent the weeks afterwards wondering if he had killed himself. She considered too whether she should get a gun, but figured if something was coming so big that Dean Winchester was scared, there probably wasn’t any point.

***

Dean told Lisa that Sam was dead, but that was all. To speak it out loud, his tale of angels who wore trench coats and demons and cages that opened with magical rings would sound ridiculous even to someone who knew that monsters could be real. But he told the story to himself everyday because in a world where the big issues were the price of gas and high cholesterol and bullying at school, he worried that his own story - Sam’s story - would fade until even he didn’t believe it.

Sometimes he’d pretend he was telling their story to his mom - of their childhood on the road, of first hunts, and close calls. Of the night Sam left for Stanford, of the night Dean went and got him back. He’d tell her about sitting on the hood of the Impala with Sam sharing a beer and staring at the stars, or the exhilaration of saving a life. Sometimes a happy memory would shine through and he’d bask in it for a moment before grief would cloud over it, and he’d find himself wading back into a sea of regrets.

Dean made himself remember every time he’d been mean to Sam, been hard on him for not being who Dean wanted him to be, for not wanting the same things Dean wanted. He thought of all the times he’d been so scared of losing him he’d held on so tight he’d nearly crushed him. In his darkest moments, he even wondered whether Sam, wherever he was, would be glad to be free of Dean at last.

***

Lisa didn’t quite know what to tell her friends and family when they asked about Dean. When you live in a small town where people have known you all your life, there’s little room for mysterious strangers to be hand-waved off as someone from your past. Then again when you and your eight year old have had to tell tales to cover up the murderous rampage of a changeling, an unexpected house guest wasn’t too much of a stretch.

She told Dean he could stay as long as he wanted. She told herself that this was no fairytale romance where the hot lover from her past turned up and they realized they were made for each other. Dean was here because he needed refuge – from the fight, from the world maybe - and Lisa seemed to be all he had.

Lisa wanted to make him better, but she didn’t know how. Sometimes she felt she was failing him, because she couldn’t stop his pain and little she did seemed to give him comfort. Other times she resented Dean when he refused to talk, as if he was the only person in the world to ever lose someone.

She was jealous, she realized, that he held onto his pain more tightly than he held onto her.

***

It wasn’t working Dean thought. He was fucking this up the way he’d fucked up most shit in his life. He wasn’t normal, had never known it, had no idea how to do it. There was simple, day to day stuff he didn’t know. How long milk lasted for, which trash went into the recyclables. He stood for ages in the supermarket once trying to work out how much toilet paper three people would use in a week.

All the things he’d spent his life learning meant nothing. Enochian was no help trying to decipher the car pool schedule for driving Ben to school, and good marksmanship didn’t help him work out not to wash Lisa’s sweaters in hot water.

There was nothing solid under him now; Dean felt like he was adrift at sea. He had no fixed point on the horizon – no _Sam_ – to anchor him.

***

As the weeks went by, Lisa got the sense there was somewhere else Dean wanted to be and she thought he only stayed with her because he was too broken to move.

She wondered if she wanted him to leave. For all she cared for him, Lisa didn’t really know if her feelings were of pity or love. She could be ruled by her heart, but she was also an intensely practical woman who ran a successful business and had raised a son on her own. She had to consider whether having a depressed alcoholic living on her couch was right for Ben.

But Dean was good, well as good as he could be, with Ben and her son already adored him. Maybe Dean wouldn’t stay for long, maybe he would, but she couldn’t see how having a caring, kind person in their lives could be a bad thing.

***

On a good day living with Lisa and Ben felt strangely safe, like being in snuggled in a blanket fort. And while Dean was wracked with guilt that he could find any comfort while Sam was suffering fuck knows what torments, he didn’t know if he had it in himself to face the world just yet.

Slowly Dean found some clarity returning, like he was coming out of a Vicodin haze. The upside was he could think better; the bad side was the pain was worse but that wasn’t unwelcome.

He wondered if he should move on, hit the road again. Maybe head back to Bobby’s and find something to hunt.

Then the weirdest thing happened, and Dean was no stranger to weird. One day he started to feel that Sam was watching him. He’d been sure of nothing for months, but Dean knew this. He checked for signs and omens: there were none. He stopped drinking for a couple of days, just to be sure. Dean just had this knowledge deep in his bones, that Sam could see him and wanted him to stay.

And for now, that was enough for Dean.


End file.
